Scottish Lass Seeks…https://www.scottishlass.scot
Scottish net feminist seeking digital enlightenment, geek fulfilment, promotion of Scottish women on the world map and, oh aye, global harmony.Sat, 09 Sep 2017 23:04:32 +0000en-GBhourly1Encrypt Awahttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ScottishLassSeeks/~3/cOkv4jT8r6o/
Sat, 09 Sep 2017 23:04:32 +0000https://www.scottishlass.scot/?p=183Finally doing some housekeeping and updating some personal domains to use Lets Encrypt certificates for websites including this one. At the moment not bothering with certs for domain aliases as pretty much all of those are redirected to the canonical versions.

]]>https://www.scottishlass.scot/2017/09/10/encrypt-awa/Fareweel Yahoo Directoryhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ScottishLassSeeks/~3/corTSxxiOgY/
Mon, 29 Sep 2014 00:15:17 +0000http://www.scottishlass.scot/?p=147Continue reading "Fareweel Yahoo Directory"]]>Aw. Surprised how sad I was to hear that Yahoo will be shutting down their Yahoo Directory. Even though I probably haven’t visited it in several years in the early days of the web it’s difficult to explain how important a site it was in its day. It’s really hard to remember the days before search engines, before Google, infoseek, altavista…how the hell did we ever find things? Directories. Browsing hierarchical categories of links submitted by other webmasters.

In 1996 I wanted to create a mini version of Yahoo Directory but only for sites about Scottish Women…just one snag…couldn’t find any, we needed to first actually create the kind of sites we wanted to see..and so Quine Online was born…but that’s another story. So thank you Yahoo for the inspiration, Quine would never have happened without it.

“Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;
Ae fareweel, alas, for ever!” – Robert Burns

I was so desperate to make sure I got the name that I shelled out the bawbees in the ‘landrush’ phase of the dotscot introduction. Couldn’t bear the thought of yet more people overseas called “Scottish Lass” snapping it up. It’s flattering so many people in other countries are wannabes but I am actually a woman in Scotland born, bred, live and work here.

I also wanted to try and make sure that Scottish businesses taking the initiative felt the benefit of supporting the new .scot domain so went with the first Scottish registrar offering .scot I could find – Calico. They’re based in Cromarty. Quaintly but in a good way, when you sign up you receive your account details in a manually drafted email from a female sysadmin, even better!

]]>https://www.scottishlass.scot/2014/09/26/scottishlass-scot/scottishlass.uk um Yu .ukhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ScottishLassSeeks/~3/FzCVpFMaEPc/
Sun, 15 Jun 2014 02:57:35 +0000http://www.scottishlass.uk/?p=129Continue reading "scottishlass.uk um Yu .uk"]]>Because I’m a web geek and am compelled to try these things, noticed that domain registrars were sending me emails to claim .uk versions of my existing domains. Apparently owners of .co.uk versions of a domain have Chief Baggsying Rights to secure the new .uk extension. So yep have made the move. Shorter = good…but still with that annoying, you know, .uk bit. Wish http://dotscot.net/ would get their skates on for domains with a relationship with Scotland. Oh joy, more registration fees.

So for the purposes of this experiment www.scottishlass.co.uk is now www.scottishlass.uk

]]>https://www.scottishlass.scot/2014/06/15/scottishlass-uk-um-yu-uk/“I think I need a hard drive to manage my hard drives”http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ScottishLassSeeks/~3/HCvGyz0U-Tw/
Sat, 23 Feb 2013 11:48:58 +0000http://www.scottishlass.co.uk/?p=118Continue reading "“I think I need a hard drive to manage my hard drives”"]]>With a weary sigh I realised that I was yet again close to running out of archive space on my external hard drives ( again). I’ve always been meaning so sort out my menagerie of assorted external drives. Never really been happy with trusting precious family video footage to a single hard drive so seem to end up duplicating things – a royal pain in the bahooky with external USB drives. Might yet start looking at Amazon Glacier for off-site backups. I’d also been wondering about getting nas storage to end the madness of buying yet another standalone hard drive.It never seems to matter what capacity of drive I buy, always end up filling them. I’ve got a mixture of time machine backups, hard drive images, raw video and audio recordings, iTunes music library, not to mention all the video podcasts for mac/iO? All in different places. It gets impossible to remember where to find things, not to mention the vulnerability of losing content if a drive fails.
Enough!
Have taken the plunge and ordered a synology ds213air…and amazon prime being amazon prime half a day later it’s here. Alas the drives I wanted weren’t in stock so will need to wait for those so at the moment it’s about as much use as a chocolate tea pot. Gives me time to plan. I like that it’s got built-in wifi and router. Could I have ‘always on’ backup storage? Pretty short of power sockets so sensible power usage is another concern. Gives the possibility of accessing the storage remotely e.g streaming multimedia – handy if you’re on a tablet device, hate having to switch on a computer just to get access to files.

]]>https://www.scottishlass.scot/2013/02/23/i-think-i-need-a-hard-drive-to-manage-my-hard-drives/EC2 Micro instance and MySQL ‘gone away’http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ScottishLassSeeks/~3/jMDwyCgUkms/
Mon, 04 Feb 2013 17:58:42 +0000http://www.scottishlass.co.uk/?p=116Continue reading "EC2 Micro instance and MySQL ‘gone away’"]]>After having tried small Amazon EC2 instances at work with no problems am now looking at micro instances at home. Found that a number of apps I’d installed on top of the default Amazon Linux – MySQL/postfix were failing even with very little activity. It was only then Googling that I found that these minimally resourced machines have no swap memory configured by default, so those apps needing burst of more memory can fail. Happily, following the instructions in Amazon EC2 Micro Instance Swap Space – Linux has fixed this. Lots of folk recommend *not* using micro instances for production systems for anything other than light use. Still the price is right (free tier for first year) so will keep dabbling

Beg to differ (ZOMG a blog post!). Don’t know quite what’s happened to my brain recently but it’s started being able to take on and learn new things in a way that hasn’t been possible for several years. The poor health and illness of recent years must have subsided enough for some shreds of normal learning to take place. In the last couple of months have got my head around:

Amazon Web Services.Ooh there’s still a bit of a tingle when you fire up a new service and then you realise…

darn, guess I’ve got to start paying for this now.

EC2, Route 53, Elastic IPs, EBS, S3,.. a whole alphabet soup of acronyms and different services but somehow, somehow they all seem to be straightforward to learn and get working quickly. I’ll give a massive hat tip to whoever organises the developer documentation. Now we have a tendency as a profession to moan about the quality of docs, poorly written docs are sometimes worse than having no docs at all but the Amazon Web Services documents are written very clearly. Lost count of the number of times reading them when I’ve thought, “I wonder what happens if you want to do X,Y,Z…then in the very next paragraph/section they explain exactly that. Spooky, but exceptionally nice.

Git
No there’s no missing ‘old’ prefix
All the cool peeps seem to be using it for version control these days and github.com has become the go to resource for new projects. Shame to see how sourceforge.net seems to have lost its way issue queues and project discussion forms get quieter and quieter.

Markdown
This is a simple way of formatting text documents so that they are readable just as plain text but also become formatted with headings/bold etc. when uploaded to a markdown renderer (such as the project descriptions on github.com). This is one of those things that is such a simple idea and yet so helpful.

And what next? What next indeed. Something I seem to trip over on almost a daily basis is the ‘R‘ language. Really think I should try this next for manipulating and visualising data sets. I have a pet project on the go that involves data sets from various organisations. Such a bewildering range of layouts, conventions, no two seem to be alike, it’s just about impossible to come up with uniform ways of processing all these so I think changing tack to have lots of little processing jobs – each one tailored to just that data source is going to be a more fruitful way to proceed.The key will be that it should be quick and easy so I think time spent learning about these analysis tools should be helpful.

Past that RDF(?) Think much like trying to learn Gaelic I’ve many times started enthusiastically but have shrivelled back when my brain which is less than the size of a planet melts down wondering “why am I doing this again?” What usually happens is that I love the idea of RDF it’s just in practice you never really seem to see Scottish examples of anyone using it, providing yes but being used? No. Yes as a developer you can go to the trouble of exposing endpoints for your own data but if no one else utilises it, what’s the point? Might as well give this another go, see if there’s been any improvement, need to work on my cynicism.

]]>https://www.scottishlass.scot/2012/12/31/a-guid-new-year-tae-ane-an-aw/Nexus 7 … Hell yes!http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ScottishLassSeeks/~3/dntdcXyMeuo/
Thu, 19 Jul 2012 22:19:02 +0000http://www.scottishlass.co.uk/?p=105Continue reading "Nexus 7 … Hell yes!"]]>Well it has taken a new gizmo for me to blog again. First evening with the Nexus 7 and we’re getting along famously. Can confirm that opening the box is like the puzzle round in the Krypton Factor. But first impressions are very good, damn it’s fast, scrolling pages is very smooth and without that iPad lag. Feels very much like when I first got an Eeepc netbook which I loved to bits. I think women are really going to like this device, size does matter, small is beautiful. Much easier to hold and one handed especially light, good for those long bus journeys. And I appreciate the non-slip backing, I’m forever letting an iPad slip out my clumsy hands, no such problem with this. Me likey.

]]>https://www.scottishlass.scot/2012/07/19/nexus-7-hell-yes/New Year Honourshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ScottishLassSeeks/~3/1xHp3aqKsqA/
Sun, 01 Jan 2012 22:24:04 +0000http://www.scottishlass.co.uk/?p=102Continue reading "New Year Honours"]]>Apart from Lorraine Kelly here’s a list of other women in Scotland who received honours

Isobel, Mrs ANDERSON. Chair, Carers Scotland Advisory Committee. For services to the community in Dundee.

Elizabeth, Mrs BENNETT. For charitable services in Scotland.

Cherry Buchanan, Mrs BRIGGS. College Manager, Reid Kerr College, Paisley. For services to Scottish Further Education and Young People in Renfrewshire.